Which roughly translates as “In Britain, criticism of German politics has become more vicious, but unlike in France, it is not the work of the Left”, and the paper quotes the “ultra-conservative” Nigel Farage, Mayor Boris Johnson and The Daily Mail's Simon Heffer, who compared the European Union to a Fourth Reich.

I would say the opposite is true, and that unwarranted comparisons with Germany’s past have become far less common (and in fairness to the Mail, Heffer was comparing the EU with the Second Reich, not the Third). Back in the mid-1990s red-top tabloids would regularly refer to the Germans as Huns, Krauts and Jerrys. World War Two and Nazi references were far more common than today, and this might have something to do with public demand. Back in 1996 when the Daily Mirror ran its “Achtung! Surrender. For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over” headline, it received vast numbers of complaints from readers, who were embarrassed to be associated with such dreadful, ancient clichés (especially as the German players, and fans, were impeccably well-behaved and friendly guests).

In fact, as this recent YouGov poll shows, the English are far more positive about the Germans than they are about the French. A majority of Britons – 61 per cent – view Germany as a friendly country, compared to just 40 per cent who see France in the same way, while the British think both the Germans and French are better at running most aspects of their country.

The problem is not that the British are anti-German but that they are ignorant of Germany. In the late 19th century it was assumed that cultured English people spoke German, and to appreciate music, philosophy or archaeology it was considered virtually essential. Middle-class Britons also went on holiday to Germany, something that they don’t do so much nowadays.

Germany’s growing cultural strength in the 19th century was reflected by the number of German loan words entering English, such as Zeitgeist, Gestalt and Leitmotiv. In addition German was the language of cultured European Jewry, so that German-Jewish intellectuals projected German cultural domination – think of Freud and Marx, the two most brilliant and influential thinkers of the past 150 years.

Alas that culture is now over. And German cultural domination was destroyed by the catastrophe of 1914-1945, with millions killed in two wars and thousands of great minds driven abroad in the period in between. Since then most German loanwords in English have tended to come via Commando comics – achtung, Blitzkrieg and schnell. And after the Blitz the English Teutophile tradition was well and truly kaput, and the English virtually cut themselves off from German culture, language and history. I remember a poll taken in the mid-1990s in which the British public were asked to name some famous Germans: Jurgen Klinsmann and Boris Becker were the only non-Nazis who made the list.

That’s quite sad, and yet the English quite like the Germans, who they see as similar to them. It’s just a shame that the education system and the wider cultural institutions, such as the BBC, make little effort to impart the benefits of German culture on them, rather than German utopian political ideas.